Stop the Peonization of American Labor!by Dennis
Rahkonenwww.dissidentvoice.org
September 4, 2004

American
workers are deliberately being turned into little more than glorified peons.

Their good union jobs have
been outsourced to peanut-pay locales overseas, and those lucky enough to
find any replacement employment at all must try making ends meet with annual
wages averaging $9,000 less than before.

Benefits and pensions have
broadly been whittled away to uselessness, or eliminated altogether.

Recent data disclosed that
U.S. poverty climbed for the third straight year, as did the number of our
citizens without health insurance.

Nearly 45 million of us are
medically uninsured, a larger total than the entire population of many world
countries. In a high percentage of those countries, however, affordable,
single-payer insurance protects everyone.

What an embarrassment for
America to be so backward in such a key human regard!

Our shameful decline is
humiliatingly evident in other pivotal areas as well.

Despite constant
productivity advances, real wages for private-sector employees have fallen 8
percent since 1973. The typical American is toiling longer hours for less
compensation, and most middle-class families need two or more breadwinners
to put food on the table and a roof over their heads.

For entry-level workers
lacking a college education, the problem is far worse. Their real wages have
dropped over 20 percent during the past quarter century.

America’s income gap is the
developed world’s widest, with rich and poor growing farther apart not just
in wealth, but in general opportunity and essential quality of life.

Adding insult to injury,
the Bush administration has maliciously revamped overtime rules, to the
harsh detriment of millions and the concomitant gain of Big Business
profiteers.

Here’s how the overtime
scam will play out:

In compliance with a wish
list drawn up by several of the largest industry associations, the
Department of Labor is reclassifying various workers to exempt them from
overtime coverage. Nurses, chefs, dental hygienists, secretaries, web
designers, paralegals, reporters, pre-kindergarten and nursery school
teachers, etc. -- even certain factory workers -- will now be nominally
promoted to become “managers” or “learned professionals.”

In exchange for their
dubious new titles, those workers will lose time-and-a-half for hours
clocked in above 40 per week. Currently, the average employee whose income
includes overtime pay gets $161 each week for his or her extra hours.

As stated in a Utility
Workers of America bulletin: “These overtime pay cuts are like a giant new
tax on working families by a president who, at the same time, works hard to
give tax breaks to millionaires.”

Even with overtime,
countless families in our low-income, service-oriented economy have been
living so close to the bone that any sudden, untoward development -- an
emergency cropping up out of the blue -- thrusts them into financial ruin.

Bringing harrowing threats
of homelessness and hunger.

Adding unbearably to the
crisis nature of this economic injustice is the fact that, under rightwing
political impetus, government programs and assistance crucial to the poor
have been largely done away with.

To get what they previously
received as safety-net protection under New Deal and Great Society
initiatives, low-income workers must now pay directly out of their own
pockets.

But their pockets are
empty, and an intolerable suffering is consequently spreading through the
richest nation on earth.

Accompanied by growing
anger.

It used to be that each
succeeding generation of American wage earners could reasonably expect to
acquire a higher living standard than their grandparents and parents knew.

Not so anymore.

In a job environment where
anti-union big box employers like Wal-Mart have replaced organized
manufacturing plants as the steadily weakening backbone of the U.S. economy,
kids coming up have pretty bleak employment prospects.

Most new jobs are low wage.
Three-fifths of minimum-pay employment is part time. Given American workers’
huge difficulty in breaking out of that dead-end predicament, our nation is
faced with an impending social catastrophe.

According to trends
documented by Beth Shulman, in her eye-opening book, The Betrayal of Work:
How Low-Wage Jobs Fail 35 Million Americans, nearly one-third of U.S.
workers will fall within low-income ranks by 2010.

All this explains how Wall
Street and its investors can be enjoying lucrative “recovery” while Main
Street endures worsening pain.

Rapacious class warfare is
being conducted against our wage-earning majority. It’s through their
deprivation and opportunity denial that monopoly capitalism is managing to
thrive. There is no worse parasitism in the natural world than this sucking
of workers’ lifeblood...this blatant exploitation of the many to lavish the
unprincipled few.

It’s a colossal sin -- a
dreadful result of unchecked crime in the suites -- that we’ve been
economically chained to the same purchasing-power status that prevailed when
disco ruled the airwaves and we wore bell-bottom pants and platform shoes!

Getting ahead is the
American Dream’s core expectation.

But under a politics that
invariably favors elites over the masses, we’re hurtfully falling behind.

Workaday wage earners
comprise our country’s overwhelming adult majority. In a true democracy “of,
by and for the people,” it’s those folks who get up early each morning to go
to America’s basic jobs that should determine how the U.S. economy
functions, and in whose fundamental behalf.

They would be keeping the
great wealth their collective labor creates, instead of seeing it stolen by
bosses unscrupulously prospering by hook or crook. Or by being socked with
taxes to offset evasive loopholing by the rich.

America itself will
ultimately collapse if its workers are exploited to the point where they
can’t buy back what their toil produces.

Economic injustice is an
issue that rarely gets sufficient emphasis, which is exactly what those
running siphon hoses from our thinning billfolds into their swelling
corporate coffers want.

Hooking up with unions and
taking advantage of their skills and clout is an indispensable part of this
remedial process, especially in the lowest, service-sector categories. (Two
unions that have won important advances for especially bottom tier workers
are UNITE HERE and the Service Employees International Union. Contact them
if you’re hurting and can’t stand it any longer.)

“All for one and one for
all” is the only alternative to all of our lives otherwise going down the
drain, no matter how hard we individually try to stay afloat, futilely
splashing toward better tomorrows.

It’ll take a determined,
well-organized, seamlessly unified fight to lift us out of imposed,
modern-day peonage.

Defeating George Bush is an
essential first step to winning change. However, we’d be foolish to pin our
hopes solely on John Kerry or the Democratic Party.

We the people will
ourselves have to collectively guide the system to make it function for the
public welfare and the common good.

Regardless of who wins in
November, it’ll take our unrelenting demands for shared progress and
prosperity to bring America back from a labor status that, incredibly, seems
like something experienced in the pre-industrial period, if not the Dark
Ages.

Dennis Rahkonen, from Superior, WI, has been writing progressive
commentary and verse for various outlets since the ‘60s. He can be reached
at dennisr@cp.duluth.mn.us.